One of the themes that has been hammered into us, especially with respect to Iran, is the accusation that Iran has been a "state sponsor of terrorism." The T-word.
I've just read an article in The Intercept about the Syrian refugee crisis:
By the time the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 ended, Israeli forces had expelled about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes. Their plight led to the overthrow of Arab regimes as well as civil wars in Jordan in 1970 and in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. Israel bombed refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and Gaza. Radicalized Palestinians staged hijackings, airport massacres and suicide bombings that captured headlines around the world and more than once led to dangerous American-Soviet confrontations.
The legacy of Syria’s refugee disaster awaits. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, António Gutteres, has just declared that 4 million Syrians are now refugees in neighboring countries. That is almost six times greater than the number who fled Palestine. Another 7.6 million Syrians, he says, have also lost their homes but remain destitute within Syria. Gutteres said, “This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation.”
(my bold)
Many of us followed the blog of Riverbend, Baghdad Burning, through the Iraq War.
In 2007 she fled to Syria.
It is estimated that there are at least 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria today. I believe it. Walking down the streets of Damascus, you can hear the Iraqi accent everywhere. There are areas like Geramana and Qudsiya that are packed full of Iraqi refugees.
In 2013, she fled to "a third Arab country."
Looking back at the last ten years, what have our occupiers and their Iraqi governments given us in ten years? What have our puppets achieved in this last decade? What have we learned?
We learned a lot.
We learned that while life is not fair, death is even less fair- it takes the good people. Even in death you can be unlucky. Lucky ones die a ‘normal’ death… A familiar death of cancer, or a heart-attack, or stroke. Unlucky ones have to be collected in bits and pieces. Their families trying to bury what can be salvaged and scraped off of streets that have seen so much blood, it is a wonder they are not red.
We learned that you can be floating on a sea of oil, but your people can be destitute. Your city can be an open sewer; your women and children can be eating out of trash dumps and begging for money in foreign lands.
We learned that justice does not prevail in this day and age. Innocent people are persecuted and executed daily. Some of them in courts, some of them in streets, and some of them in the private torture chambers.
We are learning that corruption is the way to go. You want a passport issued? Pay someone. You want a document ratified? Pay someone. You want someone dead? Pay someone.
We learned that it’s not that difficult to make billions disappear.
PAY SOMEONE.
From the most desperate, to the most powerful, money is the ticket. Where are countries and their citizens? Under the obscene nomenclature in the United States, there are Citizens United, a corporate people. Banks get to decide what "the cradle of democracy" rocks, too.
If a US president decides that the elite people who must know better (why would they have become elite, if they did not?) can press for a deal that will make American workers suffer, and perhaps give other countries some leverage over our own standards, who are you? Who do you fight for or against? Small local squabbles grow and intensify. Some people try to revive their historic civil wars and reach back to drag ugly histories to the forefront again.
Dudes and Dudesses--where is your country?